So Claude and Excel is an add-in sidebar that embeds Claude AI directly inside of Microsoft Excel. It's not a chatbot that you paste screenshots into. It natively reads your actual workbook, every cell, every formula, and every dependency chain. And whilst this is still in beta, this is something that I think once you grab the basics of, you'll be understanding exactly how to use this. You must understand that this is actually different from just using Claude in the browser because when you upload axlsx file to a regular chatbot via Claude, it will flatten the data into plain text formulas, cell references, and all of those sheet structures are lost. But when you're actually using the sidebar in Excel, this is where it can directly edit your spreadsheet, give you cell level citations, and actually do real meaningful work. So now if you are wondering about the requirements for this, this does actually require a Claude Pro subscription priced at around $20 a month or a max team or enterprise subscription. Now this does work within your existing Claude usage limits. So it's important to note that if you are managing your usage, you will log in

with these same accounts and there is no separate cost for Claude XL. And if you're wondering which models are inside, it's Opus 4.6 and Sonet 4.6. So now if you actually want to install this, make sure you are on the home tab. Then you want to click addins here. Then you can see if you type in Claude, you should be able to see Claude by Ananthropic. And then you'll just be able to add this in. And then that's how you add it. Now, if that doesn't work for you, you can actually head on over to the Microsoft marketplace and you can see this button right here. You'll be able to download Claude Anthropic for XL. Just make sure that when you click get it now, you're signing in with the correct Microsoft account that you're going to be using. Of course, once you've actually installed this, you will see the Claude icon pop up in the top right hand side. And then if you just click it, you can see it pops up. Usually you will have to sign in. Just make sure that you're signing in with your main account and then this will pop up here. Now before you do start this, I want to show you some settings that you probably do want to have on. So if you click more options, you click settings. Ideally, you want to turn on session logging because that is going to make sure it shows you exactly what it changed. That way if you do have an

Excel workbook that changes in a way you didn't expect, you'll know exactly what Claw did. And also I would say as a security measure, don't forget to back up the Excel book because if you don't and Claude makes a bunch of changes. You don't want to be stuck with a version that is just messy. Ensure you have a duplicate version before you make all of the changes with Claude. Another thing that is very useful is that if you actually do want to access Claude as well, this is another thing before we start. If you click Ctrl Alt C, you can see that right here you can actually show the Claude sidebar. And so if we click okay, you can see this is going to pop up. This is something that you don't really need to do, but for those of you who love to use shortcuts, this is going to help you out every time you need to turn it on and off. So, you can just turn it on and turn it off with a quick shortcut. One of the first things I will show you is just how powerful this is. So, for me, I'm going to be using Opus 4.6. And I'm actually going to show you just how quickly Claude can get to work. So, essentially what you want to do is describe in as much detail when you're prompting. So, for example, if you're a business owner, let's say, for example, you wanted to build something super super simple. You could say, "I need to build a small business sales and expense tracker. Create a new Excel structure

with these sheets called expenses, sales, and summary." And now, this is of course super super basic, but this is something that you can do super quickly. Now, this is where I want to show you guys one of the first things that you should not press. I don't think you should ever press the always allow dangerously always allow. This is because essentially what it will always do is it will always go ahead and change these cells regardless of what you want. So, if you enter a prompt wrong, it will actually go ahead and just change a bunch of different cells. But if you do allow once, this means that you actually approve every action that it takes that it knows could have catastrophic changes to your entire workbook. So, I'm going to click allow once and then we're going to move on. So, here we're able to see exactly what Clawude just built out. This only took around, I think, a minute or two and it actually gives you the full detail on how it reasoned through this. So if you ever do wonder how it managed to build this, it actually shows you exactly the entire reasoning. So it's important to look over there. It shows you the key metrics. It says the monthly breakdown, the expense by category. So you can see I've got sales,

expenses, and the summary. So if I were to enter a sale, let's say the date is today's date or whatever. Let's just say, you know, you sold one unit price, we sold, let's say we sold 200 of them. Let's say we sold the projects called, I don't know, marketing. You can see if we go over to the summary, you can see it immediately adds that the entire sales revenue. And of course, if we had expenses, let's just say we had an expense that was 120. Let's say it was tax deductible. And you can see it's a dropown menu saying yes or no. So you could just click yes or no. Payment method that much. And of course category. You can see it also added these these dropown menus which is super super useful. And of course if you go into the summary, it's going to calculate everything. So I have a AI generated Q1 sales performance report. You can see it's got all of these you know pieces of information in these tables. So what I will do is I will now feed this to Claude. So, all I'll need to do is click this little button right here. You click plus. Then you can see it says add files or photos. Then if you click add, you can also literally just drag it in if you want. And I can literally say fill out the Excel with the data from this PDF. And so now what

it's going to do is it's going to be able to pass the PDF into readable data, read that PDF, and then put that into our Excel sheet. And so what we can actually see here that is really cool is that it absolutely did everything and it was very very effective at for example in this PDF there are some areas that simply won't fit into the Excel sheet such as the regional sales breakdown key performance indicators. So what Claude actually decided to do here was it actually decided to just add these categories at the end. So you can see it says revenue by product line sales representative performance and it actually shows variances year-over-year growth and all the KPIs and other things. So, I think this is of course very very useful because not only do you not have to sit here and input all the data, but if you have a PDF, if you have a word document, Claude is actually able to, you know, put all of that data in, fill it out on every metric. And you can see it doesn't take that long. Now, of course, when passing a PDF and inputting multiple different values, it will take a while, maybe around 5 minutes. But, of course, I do think that this is much more effective than you just sitting at

your desk doing this task for yourself. Now another thing that I really do find interesting with Claude is that let's say for example you want to actually understand what it's calculating. For example, we can see the net profit and loss here. If we double click this you can see it actually just basically subtracts B4 from B5 to of course gives you your net profit and loss which is a simple equation. But if I copy this and let's say it was something that was far more complex. I can put this in and I can say what is this formula doing? Please explain. And so it'll actually give you the context in your Excel workbook what that is actually doing. And so you can see that it gives you the entirety of what that cell is doing. And this is very useful if Claude generates something that you may not understand exactly what it calculates, what it is trying to calculate or if you have an existing Excel file that you do want to understand exactly what's going on there. A super useful tool. Now, for example, if you do have an Excel workbook sheet that does actually have errors, what it can actually do is, of course, fix those errors. So, once again, I've actually created a sheet

here that actually has five intentional errors that were designed to input/give the wrong results. And here, what I'm going to say is find and fix the errors that exist in the monthly budget report. So, now it's going to do, it's going to completely find all of these errors, and then it's going to fix them. And this is completely useful when you have an Excel sheet that maybe has some kind of, you know, something wrong with it that you don't really know what's going on. But this is something that I find to be super super useful, especially working with sheets that are super weird. And here you can see in real time it is actually fixing all of the values. And it's just super super useful. So don't ever think that, you know, if you have any crazy crazy errors, Claude won't be able to solve them. Literally just ask it to find them, solve them, and it will ask you what values to put in, and you'll be able to solve them. Now, another thing that you can do with Claude that I find super super useful here is that it can clean up messy data. So, in this table, you're going to see that I have a lot of data that isn't real at all. It's completely fake. But what you can do is I've purposefully designed this data to be a bit messy. So, for example, what I can do here is I can, for example, the address, you can

see I want to separate that out. So, I can say split the address column into street, city, and postcode because of course that would be a lot more useful. And here you can see in just a few moments it actually managed to pass the rows correctly. You can see now we've got the street, now I've got the city. And of course if I scroll to the side, now I've got the postcode. Another thing as well, you can see all of the dates here are wrong. Well, not wrong. They're just formatted weirdly. So I can say standardize all the dates to year, month, and date. Then of course Claude Opus is going to be able to do this easily. Now another thing that Claude can actually do here that is really cool is that it now another thing that Claude can actually do here is it can actually visualize the data. So this is a really simple thing but of course if you're in Excel this might be useful for you. So you can say visualize this data. Visualize the monthly budget report please as a chart bar chart. And so in around 20 seconds here you can see we have the monthly budget versus the actual. And this is the entire chart. And you can see it literally has that data right there which is super super useful. Of course don't forget you can resize this if you do want. You can literally resize it any way anywhere you

want. But this is something that I find to be super super useful if you don't like staring at the charts all the time. Of course, don't forget you can of course change the styles. But that is something for you know Excel. Now another thing that you can do of course some advanced users may want to use Excel to you know create formulas and stuff and you can actually do that with Claude yourself. So you can say write a formula to calculate the total cost because right now you can see this one isn't currently there and doesn't have the total cost but you can once again ask Claude to write these formulas for you. So if you don't have the expertise to do that, it will do that. And you can see we immediately have the data there. Here you can literally see it says done. The total cost is formula C4 multiplied by D4. Quantity time unit cost has been written into the formula. And of course if you click these blue icons as well, this is going to be something that shows you exactly where it's being changed. So for example, here you can see the formula challenge. It's all of this. And then when you click this, it shows you the first one. And so if you want to go even further with this, you can say build a formula that flags anything over $500 as high value. And so if we put that value in, you're going to see that it's going to create that value and then

things are going to get flagged. And here you can see it added the tab priority, high value, standard value. And so yeah, once again, really, really cool. Now, it's important to get on to the things that Claude cannot do in Excel. Now bear in mind, this is just currently, so maybe in the future it will be able to do things, but this is just at the moment. Now, considering everything you've seen here, something that I think you should know is that this is not a replacement for Excel expertise. Plaude can still be wrong. You do have to verify the values because if you're in a high stakes job, do remember that these models can hallucinate. It isn't often, but if you're somewhere where the values do matter and big decisions are being decided on this, you must verify that the values are accurate because Anthropic doesn't guarantee that these models will not hallucinate. Additionally, this system isn't recommended for highly sensitive/ unregulated data without proper controls. Do remember that Enthropic will be sending this data to their servers and it will be held there for a maximum of 30 days. So for very large sensitive data sets, it's probably not worthwhile to use this. So if you're thinking about financial protections, customer data, employee salaries, social security numbers, those could all end up

on anthropic servers. And remember, the team/enterprise plans do not inherit custom data retention settings for the Excel addin. So just bear that in mind. Another thing is that Claude actually cannot do VBA. So if you do need that to be done, this simply cannot be done with Claude. You can't do any VBAs or macro. It cannot write, read or execute VBA code or macros. And remember guys, there is no chat history between the sessions. Every time you reopen this, it's going to be a fresh new conversation. So do bear that in mind. So if you close down Excel, you save and you get off, when you come back in, it's going to be completely fresh. There is no chat history in this mode. But with that being said, if you enjoyed the video, don't forget to check out some of our other AR tutorials, and hopefully you learned